Ilias Aberkane writes:
Page 9 (chapter "Battle"):
"Stallman broke away from MIT in 1984 when he founded the Free Software Foundation."
This conflates two different dates. Stallman did leave MIT in January 1984 (to work on GNU, announced September 1983), but the Free Software Foundation was not founded until October 1985 — officially incorporated October 4, 1985.
Sources:
- GNU history (Stallman): "The Free Software Foundation was founded in October 1985, initially to raise funds to help develop GNU." https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-history.html
- The GNU Project (Stallman): "In January 1984 I quit my job at MIT and began writing GNU software." https://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation (Formation: October 4, 1985)
So the correct sequence: GNU announced Sept 1983, Stallman left MIT Jan 1984, FSF founded Oct 1985.
On page 94,
The quote from Kirk McKusick's history of Berkeley UNIX reads:
"Early in 1977, Joy put together the 'Berkeley Software Distribution.' This first distribution included the Pascal system, and, in an obscure subdirectory of the Pascal source, the editor vi."
In McKusick's original text ("Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix," in Open Sources), the same passage says "the editor ex," not vi. The history backs that up too: 1BSD (1977) shipped ex, while vi only arrived with 2BSD in mid-1978 — which the book itself confirms on the next page, where vi is described as "one of the new tools included in version 2 of BSD."